So me and Liam have been working flat out on the visual effects project, and its coming along nicely. We had a couple of problems with the house, after watching some tutorials we thought we would be able to use the polygon house model and attatch the geometry to a nurbs sphere which we could blow up. After alot of hassel we found the only way to attatch geometry was to glue it to the layer. However when we glued the geometry to the explosion on a sphere the object were constrained to the rounded deformer used to blow the sphere apart, this resulted in a clumping of geometry in certain areas of the explosion.

We really wanted to use the polygon model of the house as we felt it was the better model, so we thought we would try to crack each individual piece of the house and run the simulation as ridgid bodies, we downloaded a script called Axcrack to break up each piece of geometry and after an hour or so of breaking the pieces one by one (there is no multi polygon selection tool) we found that the script would not work on alot of our geomerty. We switched over to maya shatter (although knowing it’s bad reputation) as we could shatter multiple polygons at once. Once again this didnt work and would only shatter one section of the house.

As were on quite a tight deadline our only option was to go back to the nurbs model. However this has proven to turn out quite nicely. There is still alot to do on the house but here is our progress so far.

I have some playblasts of the simulation so far but they need converting, and its late so i will upload them tomorrow.

So Liam and I have been doing some tests just using ridgid bodies and a ball to see how the house smashes apart as standard.

Here are the results.

From this we can see that we will probably need some back on it as it breaks apart a bit bare. The simulation time is also pretty long due to the interpenetration of ridgid bodies, which is only going to get worse when we strat cracking up peices of geomerty.

So today i have been working on the fire for the sheep. For this i used maya fluids, i used 6 emmiters so that all the body parts are covered.

As you can see my first test didnt work very well.

Ok so now i have the fire working when its still, i am going to animate it to see how the fire reacts when moving at high speeds.

I found i had trouble getting the fire to stay on the head as it is pushing back through the body. To overcome this i created an emmiter in the shape of a semi circle and put it infront of the sheeps face.

As the rest of the screen is black it is hard to make out the legs, but i think its looking pretty good.

I tried making the emitter a bit bigger, it looks good but its hard to make out that it is a sheep.

I need to add a smoke trail and then try and animate it crashing and spinning to see how the fire reacts.

Well we have been busy getting our vfx shot ready to start animating the dynamics and particles on.

We decided to model the house from seperate bits so when it can to breaking it apart we have alot more control over it.

Here is the house in which Liam Fraser modeled, and we both unwraped and textured.

Our original idea was to have realistic sheep coming down like comets, however after speaking to georg we have decided to use plastic sheep, this way we dont have to worry about rigging the sheep, or making them realistic.

So here is the sheep that i modeled.

We have tracked our footage which i will upload shortly, so our next move is to start adding dynamics.

The dynamics we need are:

Fire/smoke trails coming from the sheep as there falling.

Dust clouds as soon as the sheep hit the building.

Paritcles emiting from the contact site, in which we will assign geomerty to mimic ruble flying.

Smoke from the chimney.

Fire and smoke simmering on the contact sites after the sheep have made contact.

Cg water splashes.

Ground destruction when the sheep make contact with the floor. (we will probably make a couple of different crators, and then comp them in as soon as the shhep hits the floor, this way we dont have to create a ground plane that we can destroy, as this would have to be comped in seamlessly or it wont look right.